What if the shape of data in the dev db doesn't stay consistent with real life?

Is the harness for the AI set up with any sort of instructions to generally prefer broadly-applicable first-principals query performance analysis over unintuitive results that may be local maxima due to certain things specific to that env?

Even with humans I've had to unwind "optimizations" before that worked great for low-volume envs by taking advantage of 'be inefficient in the small scale with memory to save CPU and wall clock time' or such in a way that caused pain deployed.